1. Genealogy’s Ethos

An ethos—a living movement of thought—takes place in Foucault’s discourse. We have seen that it does not constitute or lead to an ethics. I have suggested that this movement is one of recoil, that the distance and divisions of traditional ethical formations recoil in Foucault’s thought in a way that displaces the structures and desires of self-relation, and that Foucault’s thought recoils on itself in a way that prevents it from becoming a basis for specific ethical programs. Its middle voice, we shall see, is found in a recoiling movement that keeps ethics as such in question. We shall first see how this recoiling occurs in three of Foucault’s specific studies of the formation of the self as we know it and live it. By the recoiling movement of his thought the idea of self-constitution is held at bay, and hence the possibility of ethics is made optional in the ethos of Foucault’s genealogy.

A. RECOILING KNOWLEDGES

Characteristically, Foucault’s genealogies produce knowledge that falls back on its own inheritance and by this return recoils away from the powers that have ordered things and protected themselves in the given, inherited discourse.¹⁰ The recoil may occur under the force of the genealogical study, as in the case of The Order of Things in which the study pushes itself back to the events and disruptions that have led to the attraction and viability of genealogical knowledge. In this case the mutations and disruptions that have been traditionally ignored and are major forces in forming the structures of knowledge under investigation are given power in the order and formation of Foucault’s discourse. His genealogical recoil, in the sense of falling back, involves returning to the lineage of his work, uncovering the nonsystematic interruptions in systematic knowledge, showing that these interruptions are motivations toward genealogy within nongenealogical methodologies and epistemic orders, and recasting the reformation and succession of these methodologies and epistemic orders in relation to the mutations and disruptions that they have systematically ignored. His genealogical knowledge falls back on its lineage by the force of factors in the lineage that have been excluded from the lineage’s self-interpretation.

There is a second kind of recoil in The Order of Things. In it the knowledge developed by the genealogical study has the effect of coiling again the various discursive and epistemic strands and forming a springing, self-overcoming movement whereby the truth of this knowledge is relegated to a lineage that is itself now in question. This recoiling movement includes an appropriation by the genealogical knowledge of its place in the lineage of the discourse-specific regularities (“necessities”) that order and define the knowledges that it studies. It arises, for example, out of both the rupture of the modern subject of knowledge and the regularities of knowledge that define this rupture. This kind of recoiling movement, in the sense of coiling again in a springing movement, brings to light in Foucault’s genealogical knowledge both the regional and permutational formations that constitute the recoiling movement and the space of dissociation that characterizes it.

Foucault’s genealogical knowledge is always in a position to critique, mock, parody, and ironize itself. The possibility of parody according to Foucault, for example, arises from “the unreality” that helps produce our images and interpretations of the past—the projections that arise from the confederations of meaning and sense of a specific discourse. As the projective “unreality” that makes genealogy possible in our heritage comes to be “enjoyed” in a genealogical study, the genealogy becomes susceptible to the parody that it exercises on the subject of analysis (LCM 160-61). It finds satisfaction in the instability of its certainties, and this satisfactory instability, as we shall see, is a significant part of its recoil from the orders and practices that it uncovers and that play a role in the uncovering process.

In the context of Discipline/Punish, for example, genealogical knowledge recognizes itself in and speaks out of a lineage in which a combination of constraint, control, and punishment are ingredients in the fabric of the genealogical discipline that produces this knowledge. But this knowledge coils itself in a springlike suspicion (as aspect of satisfaction in its own instability) in its process of seeing and recognizing and has the effect of releasing itself from the grip of its own concepts. The paradox of this knowledge is found in its uncertain certainty, its releasing the discipline of its accomplishment at its limits and making part of its discipline a cultivation of the instability that will overcome its own procedures and certainties. This release occurs in part as the confinement of discipline is opened out to other options in genealogical disclosure of the disciplinary heritage. Instead of recoiling into a defensive posture or into a posited originary presence or experience, it is a recoiling motion that embodies no more than the tension of its spring out beyond its established territory. In Discipline/Punish, one is driven toward a kind of knowledge that, in its disclosure of the concealing, punishing heritage of discipline, is ill at ease with its own discipline and is left with the questionableness of its own knowledge. This recoil is made in part by the torsion of the concealing and uncovering that go on in Foucault’s genealogy.

A third type of recoiling that is typical in Foucault’s thought is exemplified in The History of Sexuality and combines with the springing motion. Foucault finds that sexual repression is a major force in our modern discourse on sexual liberation. This is a discourse that he names ‘sexuality’. Instead of the pleasure of bodies, sexuality inscribes shame of bodily pleasure in the name of sexual liberation. This genealogy, which is found particularly in the discourse of psychoanalysis and its many progeny, is a part of the lineage of fear and repression in the name of sexual liberation, and it comes to be known genealogically as part of this lineage. This genealogical knowledge recoils (in the sense that it winces) before its own history and coils itself again in a springing movement away from its own ‘sexuality’ in the direction of pleasures that, as a discourse, it does not know how to embody. Such recoiling is made by the forces of wincing, revealing, recognizing, releasing, and constraining—all of which occur in this discourse.

In The Order of Things, Discipline/Punish, and The History of Sexuality we can say preliminarily that genealogical knowledge recoils on itself and from itself, without the benefit of origins or essences, in a springing movement that is like self-overcoming rather than like the movements of self-establishment or disciplined self-nurturance. We shall examine The Order of Things in greater detail later in this chapter, since in this book the formation of genealogical knowledge develops in the question of its own lineage and without either the thought of truth or the will to truth.

B. THE READER’S RECOIL

We have said that Foucault’s thought takes place in the movement of his discourse and that reading it and thinking through it involves one in a process distinct from that of standing outside the movement and observing it from within a different configuration of ordering powers. The recoiling, self-overcoming process is not a law or principle of self-preservation or self-realization. It is not like a principle that gives unity or order or telos to the discourse. ‘Self-overcoming’ names in part the effect of nonsystematizable randomness that moves through a systematic discourse. This randomness, we shall find, has the effect of recoiling our universalizing and categorizing ideas back on themselves by means of their lineage’s heterogeneous and arbitrary formations. The absence of extra-discursive law—for example, in the Western formation of laws that are taken to be universal—that kind of instability has a recoiling force when it is thematized within our common orders of concepts and principles. It is the force of recoil in thinking with organizing principles which in their ‘work’ show that while they themselves are taken to be universally necessary, they are necessary only in the discourse that they unify. Self-overcoming in this context is found in the effect of the known whose stability depends on a discourse that is intrinsically unstable. One finds a torsion of laws that have their authority by virtue of a given lineage and that order all random things within their jurisdiction as though they derived their force from outside their heritage.

In Foucault’s case, knowing is in tension with the categories, logics, and exchanges that form his knowledge. His knowledge is anarchic in the sense that no thought of primal origin, foundation, or continuing presence structures the word patterns. This means that as one follows his thinking in the texts, one undergoes the transformation of the metaphysical patterns and habits of thought that are in the text, and, as we shall see, subtle physical transformations also take place that may occasion a hostile recoil on the part of the reader in the sense of shrinking back, wincing, or quailing in the face of the transformative process. This recoil by a reader is, of course, distinct from the self-overcoming rebound of his text. It is a movement away from self-overcoming, and this kind of recoil is often all the more powerful because it is unconscious.

The interaction of rebound from the given heritage in the text and a heritage-bound shrinking from the text in reading it creates a strange situation of interpretation. In shrinking from the text one may exercise a violence against the text by unconsciously and systematically eliminating the work’s own self-overcoming as one interprets it. This reaction is evident in some discussions of Foucault, which reinscribe his work in a metaphysical concept or problem, such as the necessity of a constructive concept of subjectivity, an implicit ethics, or a hidden humanism. Others read him as an historicist or historical relativist by ignoring the fact that the meaning of these orientations derives from a way of thinking that polarizes transcendental and temporal reality, a polarization that is problematized and largely eliminated in Foucault’s thought. Those who interpret him as a structuralist, for example, overlook the metaphysical concept of structure that characterizes structuralism, as well as its self-enclosed calculus of interpretation, and also eliminate the self-overcoming recoils that move his thought away from a structuralist orientation.

These ways of reading Foucault have in common a reassertion of metaphysical patterns and ideas that are destabilized in Foucault’s thought. These interpretations exhibit a shrinking recoil in the face of the self-overcoming that rebounds in and away from its own lineage and forces itself away from its regional center. It repeatedly falls away from the definitive interests and affections of traditional language, and this falling away in the discourse both addresses and repels a reader’s inherited discourse concerning world order. This engagement is like a mourning experience. As one undergoes the quiet passing away of a scheme of definitive linkages, a pervasive quailing sends one springing back to familiar ground and motivates commentaries that recapitulate a discourse’s metaphysical basis for life and hope. This recoiling then becomes the movement in the reader, a paradoxical kind of phenomenon, by which one may understand the turning of Foucault’s thought to a metaphysics that his thought has overcome. Writing a genealogy of this manner of perverting Foucault makes possible a reentry into the self-overcoming that is carried negatively in the reaction.

C. GENEALOGY AS EFFECTIVE HISTORY AND CURATIVE SCIENCE

In his discussion of Nietzsche’s genealogy in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Foucault outlines a way of writing history that “introduces discontinuity into our very being as it divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body, and sets it against itself. ‘Effective’ history deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it will not permit itself to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending” (LCM 154). “Knowledge is allowed to create its own genealogy in an act of cognition; and ‘wirkliche Historie’ composes a genealogy of history as the vertical projection of its posture” (LCM 157; emphasis added).

As a history projects its position vertically, so that its seams, traumas, and mutational confluences become apparent, like layers of sedimentation on a canyon wall, its process is “curative” (LCM 156). The formation of the patterns of knowing that give it its perspectives are apparent, and the effects of all the constraining factors—such as posited necessary causes, continuing presence, or transcendent laws of formation—these effects lose their power to organize blindly the linkages, multiplicity, and disruptions of things. It is the epistemic demand for constant and transcendent elements, elements that are found in the layered sedimentation, that give an aura of pathology to the traditional discourses when they are known in the perspective of their discontinuous, broken, and serially repeated associations. In that sense, genealogy is “curative” as it comes to know the fragments and random associations that function as though they were expressions or discourses of nonfragmented, continuous presence. The genealogy recoils on these claims and procedures within the genealogy.

If we stopped at this point we would appear to have a version of a modern enlightenment discourse. Genealogy would appear to shed light on certain metaphysical assumptions and concepts in terms of discontinuity and to cure us of our illusions in the presence of certain overlooked facts in our lineage. But the effect of this kind of history is to show that the genealogical approach is itself an outgrowth of a series of epistemic and institutional patterns and practices that fail to appropriate their own generative, discursive life. The curative aspect is not found in an illumination of a false discourse by a true one, but in a knowledge that finds itself both repeating and departing from the inheritances that it describes. The genealogical description is not outside of the given lineage, but within it in the perspective of its exclusions, borders, unreconciled differences, and strategies of repression.

This recoil within the lineage and away from it takes place in forces embodied in both a disciplined wincing that develops within a given discourse from the perspective of one or more aspects of the discourse before other of its aspects, and a coiling again in the form of genealogical knowledge, which rebounds away from its own authoritative repetition. This recoiling process cures the stoppage induced by self-maintaining and self-repeating centers of power against generative, exposing language and against the emergence of options that come in the wake of disclosed dangers and failures. The genealogical discourse is opened by its exposure of its own lineage to its dissent from itself and to its own overcoming, to its lack of continuous presence in the form of a transdiscursive subjectivity or regulation, and to its own dangers. It is open, as we shall see, to whatever might emerge as other than genealogy, as the lineage of genealogy dies away in the recoiling force of its own knowledge. This type of genealogy is not based on an insistence to be true or on a will to power, but occurs in the force of its own self-overcoming recoil. It consists of the conflicts and coalitions within Western thought and practice; it organizes its lineage by the forces of those coalitions and not by the validity of its principles.

We may summarize the elements of genealogical ethos in the following way:

1. Foucault’s genealogy is implicated in what it comes to know and is epistemically involved in what it exposes. The disruptions in a given lineage provide a discursive basis for his genealogy’s disruptive, curative aspect as he thinks in the perspective of what is excluded from the discourse’s organizing forces.

2. The movement of coiling again includes a torsion or springing counterplay of these elements by: (a) making public a lineage’s hidden uses of power; (b) uncovering those uses of power and structures of oppression and exclusion in the genealogy’s own knowledge; (c) giving disciplined attention to nonsystematizable randomness; (d) giving focus to accidental formations of universalized values and ideas and to the absence of transcendent regulations in the formation of laws that are taken to be ‘natural’ and universal; and (e) elaborating the discourse-specificity of the principles, rules, and regulations that are regionally necessary in a given genealogy.

3. The movement of Foucault’s thought is not ordered by a will to truth, a will to universal knowledge, or the concept of a self finding itself in self-expression. These elements are present in Foucault’s discourse, but within a recoiling movement that mitigates their ordering power.

4. The wincing recoil in Foucault’s thought is an effect of the interplay of traditionally peripheral and outcast forces, which have nontraditional organizing power in his work, with the central, organizing forces in the tradition, whose organizing power is weakened when their oppressive limitations are exposed.

5. The conflicts among the various ordering powers, that are encouraged in his genealogies, are empowered and maintained by the prominence that he gives to their divisions and nonsystematizable differences. By maintaining the conflicts without reconciliation—reconciliation effected by means of systematization or self-constitution on the basis of selected, ideal values—the force of the conflicts tends to engender options that go beyond the conflicts without resolving them. Neither reconciliation nor harmony play significant, ordering roles in his discourse.

6. A negative or hostile recoil by the reader in the presence of the self-overcoming movement in Foucault’s thought is usually a movement of thought that eliminates the self-overcoming of its own lineage and reinstitutes a self-maintaining, authoritative structure of thought.

The ethos we find in Foucault’s thought involves an embodiment of thinking and speaking that does not reconstitute an emphasis on identity and selfhood. In it one is not inclined to reconstitute a definitive self. Rather, this discourse is, on its own terms, always optional. One can move in it and then move out of it either by its self-overcoming force, or by the force of a change of direction and orientation, or by one’s involvement in a very different discourse. The fear or suspicion that Foucault’s genealogies arouse are not only a matter of one’s having a different and valued perspective. One may, for example, become a different body in thinking through Foucault and undergo the emergence of different tastes, desires, and expectations. In that changing body a person knows that other embodiments are optional identities, that identity knows no transcendental regulation, that one is a discursive body amidst many discourses and sub-discourses. One may move out of Foucault’s ethos—indeed, on its terms one can always move out of it—perhaps rather more marked than Aphrodite or Socrates the morning after an evening’s bout, but not so marked as to have lost something essential, not so marked as to have fallen or risen by the standards of a self that seeks fulfillment of an already given nature.

The embodiment of Foucault’s ethos includes knowledge of the optional manner of selfhood and identity. One is in a movement of self-overcoming in which the necessity of this movement bears witness to the dangers that one has learned to dread and attempted to prevent. In this ethos one has felt the desire to expose those dangers, including the dangers of definitive selfhood and of the best values and selves one has known. One also feels and knows the temporality of the desire to expose, the discursive quality of constituting actions, the discontinuous, mutational quality of discourses, the unprotected standing of values in this discourse, and the vague horizon that promises only options, experiments, and the loss of the one we insisted on being; one knows an ethos without proposing an ethics in such knowledge, knows selves who become doubtful of selfhood because of the totalizing activity that characterizes constituting actions. Lineages are found to recoil on themselves by virtue of the divisions that define them. And one finds no complete prescriptions in all of this because the self-overcoming movement arises from the dangers, ignorance, totalizations, repressions, and conflicts that define the lineage of our possibility of being a self at all. Prescriptiveness, selfhood, and the ecstasy of insight are as much in question as are the limits of representation, the authority of the professional, and the powers that subvert human life in an effort to govern it well. The question of ethics is part of the curative effect of genealogy. Our thought and practices are not ‘cured’ by our becoming better persons, but by exposing the danger of the desire to be better. This embodiment, in contrast to self-constitution and the subjectivation that it makes inevitable, is a body of self-overcoming, one that produces knowledge in this movement and embodies an ethos of recoil in a lineage that has injured human beings by making them selves.

We shall turn now to three of Foucault’s studies in order to see in greater detail how genealogical recoil and self-overcoming characterize thought and maintain the question of ethics by putting in question their own authority. As we think through Foucault’s self-overcoming recoil, we are in a process that puts ethics and self-constitution in question. As we consider these three studies, we shall pay attention particularly to the definitive quality of the recoiling movements that lead to self-overcoming within prominent discourses and practices in our recent history. This definitive quality is found in modern thought, in institutions, and governments. It is a regional inevitability that takes its departure from specific disjunctions and failures that are both constitutive of modern discourse and systematically denied or excluded by the confederation of powers that organize them.

2. The Unbearable Lightness of Reason: Reason’s
Recoil in Madness

In Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, the movements that hold our attention are found in reason’s recoil from its own limits, which are demarcated by insanity, and also in the silent recoil of insanity from rational constraint. Both movements are marked by “the caesura that establishes the distance between reason and unreason.” Foucault himself enacts a recoil in this study in appropriating the silence of madness into his account and use of rationality. This appropriation cannot speak or think what it appropriates; to the extent that the analysis thematizes the silence of madness, it cannot make sense of what it thematizes. The aporetic disclosure of the hiddenness of madness generates a kind of knowledge that moves around or toward nonknowledge, toward something quite other than what genealogical knowledge is able to know (MC ix).

Madness and Civilization, which is a “history of insanity in the age of reason,” as its subtitle puts it, is also a genealogy of “unreason”—of the experience of no reason at all—within the language and institutions of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. In tracing folly and madness in the classical and modern periods, Foucault traces the unavoidable indications of classical and modern reason’s radical limits, which appear in relation to madness when reason’s orders, which are taken to be definitive of the world, confront no reason at all in the world. Reason’s unconscious anxiety takes the forms of multiple projects to confine madness: madness symbolizes a radical other to reason which, if placed under rational restraint, might be rational at least in a negative sense. Madness gives expression to no rational expression. Madness is not containable or graspable in the language and concepts of reason, and rationality is thus driven, out of self-consistency, to confine and contain madness in a formation of reason’s craft, in some institutional order that will give meaning to utter meaninglessness and that will reassure rational standards by the measure of the confining and correcting institution’s force.¹¹

We note a double recoil in this movement. Reason’s drawing back from its own limits as demarcated by the transgression of madness indicates that the asylum’s history is in part in the lineage of this particular kind of recoil; further, there is the recoil of madness in its silence within the reasonable processes and structures of confinement. The effort to set rational limits on madness is itself a type of madness, an expression of unreasonable anxiety at the limits of expressibility, of a rational madness that is blind to itself. Reason’s own project of confining and containing madness is one in which madness rebounds in reason’s very effort to contain it.

Yet the recoil that is most germane to our interests is found in relation to the function of the “caesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason” (MC ix). Madness and Civilization traces the break that divides reason and nonreason. How does this break occur in the genealogy of Foucault’s own study? Does it ‘define’ the space of Foucault’s study? We shall see that it both allows a certain contemporaneity with madness and occasions a recoil of Foucault’s knowledge before no presence at all, a recoil of which Foucault takes account in the language of his study.

Unreason names the rational experience of madness from the early modern period through the nineteenth century. Five groups of images aid the rational articulation of this experience: light/darkness, disclosure/hiddenness, fullness/void, truth/error, and order/disorder. Reason embraces the elements of light, disclosure, fullness, truth, and order. Beings are accessible in their truth and order by the full, disclosive light of reason. The world comes to human beings in the light of human being. Its order and truth are found in reason. This is an experience of the infinite span of being, its complete abundance, its fundamental serenity and truth. Where there is darkness, there is also encompassing light, where error, always the errant truth, where death, unquenchable and immortal life. Disorder is a matter of ignorance, unenlightened government, or irrational will. Depravity is a question of deviation, straying from an always available truth. Madness, on the other hand, transgresses the experience of eternal sufficiency. It seems to open out to mere void and unredeemable darkness. Its sheer perversion, in this context, is found in its meaningless disorder, its senseless chatter, screams, and sightless stare. The rational person looks into the eyes of the insane and sees emptiness or vacuous hilarity or dumb pain without hope or remorse. Reason’s gaze finds something less than immorality. It finds a space without the poles of morality and immorality. Less than animal innocence, it finds déraison.

“But,” says Foucault, “the paradox of this nothing is to manifest itself” (MC 107). The insane use—“explode into”—signs, words, and gestures. There is an appearance of order that evacuates itself into silent emptiness. “For madness, if it is nothing, can manifest itself only by departing from itself, by assuming an appearance in the order of reason and thus becoming contrary to itself” (MC 107). By showing itself, it withdraws from the order of its self-showing and leaves no hint of a self or of the continuation of reason. It is simple transgression in the order of knowledge, morality, and government. If one order transgressed another, one would need only to find the rationality of the conflicting orders to maintain the experience of reason. But the disclosure of madness leaves modern rationality disturbed by the absence of what seemed to be revealed. Reason is brought to the limits of its light and seems to be crossed by no light at all. This is not even a tragedy, with its fullness of sense in the alternation of light and dark in the unity of time, but transgression with no unity, no light, no truth, no contrariety. Reason may contain madness, hold it, as it were, but its containment does not restore comprehension and truth to what is held.

Unreason thus means the experience of a caesura, a radical interruption, in modern reason’s fullness. Even if the “cruel sadism” of the techniques of healing are applied to the insane with the loftiest of humane intentions, the seeming and sporadic successes that restore a person to reason’s sway do not eliminate the darkness that compromised the infinite reach of order and truth. The dominion of reason is broken by unreason, and the experience of this dominion appears irrevocably in question.

The early modern response to unreason was to confine it. One of Foucault’s intentions is to show that men of good sense, rational men, and not professional medical men, were the ones who set the standards for freedom and incarceration. At that time madness was not perceived in terms of illness, but as the paradoxical dazzlement of reason in which the absence of light and truth had ascendancy over light and truth in the apparent functions of rationality. In the mad, reason contradicted itself in its employment. In the nineteenth century, the physician became the controlling authority as madness came to be experienced as illness. That history is less our concern than the lineage of a discourse that descended from madness viewed as dazzlement in the sixteenth century to the language and thought that speaks in the caesura of unreason.

When madness is experienced as dazzled reason, it is no longer experienced as a sign of a higher order of truth. The mad do not have the special gifts of discernment that they had, for example, in the high middle ages. Neither are they objects for seers who can discern in them the language of another mysterious realm. In the early modern period, the mad were separated from a world of signs in which everything reverberates with special significance and in which a major human responsibility is to learn how to read the words of God and nature in all connections and all events. No longer are the mad either the messengers or the metaphors for transcendent truth; hence the caesura of unreason vis-à-vis reason. No system of signs brings the two together in their radical divergence. Reason is the region of truth; madness, a void of meaninglessness. The sounds of the mad are as cut off from reason as they are from the messengers of God, and they mean nothing in their radical division from the order of truth. In the delirium of dazzled reason, the transgression of reason seems to have expression; it is an expression in which being withdraws and devolves. Void and dissolution reign.

Dazzled reason is in the lineage of language in which the foundational quality of meaning, the plenitude of reason, and the infinity or eternity of life do not order the discourse. What happens when the discourse of this lineage comes to thought? The resulting movement is a major component in the lineage of Foucault’s genealogy. How does the language of this caesura compose Foucault’s thought of madness?

The practices of confining the mad and maintaining their silence, prior to the medical-psychiatric ordering of the asylum, are separated by explanatory accounts of the physical and soulish qualities of madness and by attempts to heal the disease by medication. The discourse of reason with unreason, however, takes the therapeutic turn of attempting to engage errant reason by reason in its proper function and to restore errant reason to its proper truth. In the latter psychoanalytic instance, the therapist covers over unreason through the art and language of healing talk in order to return it to its rational home. In both lineages—that of confining the mad and that of healing talk—the caesura is systematically overlooked and the breaching of reason is covered by the continuity of reasonable technique and conversation. Unreason is submerged unconsciously by rational language and organization. Reason so dominates the relation that it stands in ignorance of the frightening transgression that motivates it.

The experience of unreason, on the other hand, continues in the work of Hölderlin, Nerval, and Nietzsche (MC 212, 278). In their writing, the experience of unreason as the caesura of reason constitutes a contratempo in which time and unreason are affiliated. Time and unreason appear in a common “rootage” in the sense that time also seems to transgress the experience of modern reason in its presumed universal and self-contained movement of truth. Whereas the medicalization of madness and the discourses of therapy maintain the dominance of rationality and rational order in their efforts to cure or overcome madness, the discourses of time and unreason speak in and out of the transgression of reason. In Nietzsche, for example, genealogy shows the partial and broken strands of power that, without reason, fabricate rational orders for the mere enjoyment of exertion, creation, domination, and conflict. We have seen that the recoils of his thought articulate no reason, but rather something like déraison, as the rationality of his own thought evaporates in self-overcoming. Self-overcoming ‘rules’ the time of his heritage and puts in question the meaning of eternal return and teleological evolution. The movement of time discloses no sign by which to discern a fundamental truth or a right order of transcendent sense and meaning. The conundrum of time timing in self-overcoming interrupts the temporal configurations that hold time in the sway of meaning. The knowledge of time is undercut by the timing that traverses it. This contratempo functions as a countermemory to reason’s narratives, divides them by the ‘force’ of the caesura of unreason, and leaves without truth or technique the traces of self-overcoming that show neither a narrative nor a reason, but merely the withdrawal of anything at all. In such thought the work of reasonable good faith that seeks to free the insane by making them whole stands out as suppression not of illness but of unreason and its illumination of the darkness in which we, on the presumption of eliminating the vacuity of (un-)reason, restore people to good health. The grounds of our attempts to reconstitute broken selves to good order are brightly displayed in their “catastrophic blindness” to the anxiety that moves them.¹²

The place of Foucault’s genealogy in this lineage is clear. “The ambiguity of chaos and apocalypse,” of the disclosive effect of unreason’s “darkness” in the world of rational “light,” forecasts the passing of that order of knowledge and practice which we shall find Foucault naming ‘man’. In this passing order, the passage of time is accounted in his genealogical work to be affiliated with unreason, with the transgression of the unity that controls the configuration ‘reason’. Time lacks continuous presence just as human being lacks continuous selfhood. The caesura of unreason and the fragmented temporality of mortals that are described and marked in genealogy are modern reason’s opening to the limits of reason which traverse reason and show us no reason at all. By giving this fissure an ordering priority in his thought, Foucault is able to give prominence in his language and style of writing to the element most strenuously unregarded in the thought and style that has produced our dominant values of living, knowing, and healing. He works in the lineage of modern reason by thematizing its suppressed rupture, a rupture that is highlighted by the temporality of the modern period. The problem is that this rupture is not a theme and is, on Foucault’s own account, susceptible to absurd incorporation within thematic language.

Foucault’s work is built on a scholarship and sensibility that are unthinkable without the rational disciplines of the modern period. He crafts a knowledge of this period in terms of its own intelligibility. His language is not the dazzled nonsense of the mad. He makes distinctions, divides practices and attitudes by conceptual structures, arranges theories by categories. He argues a case that can be understood, and he means what he says. As in art, so in genealogy: “There is no madness,” he says, “except as the final instance of a work of art—the work endlessly drives madness to its limits; where there is a work of art, there is no madness; yet madness is contemporary with the work” (MC 288-89). This statement is applicable to his own work. His is not a work of madness. He brings his work to its limit by the sensible meanings that collapse before madness. In that sense he draws closer to madness than does our traditional language.

Nevertheless, the otherness of madness is contemporary to his work: his study recoils on madness in the sense that his thought continuously returns to madness as the limit of his own expression, and it finds itself cast back on itself by what it would, but cannot, address. He takes his bearings from the transgression of madness, from the déraison that puts in question everything he has to say about it. The otherness of madness remains. He can designate its silence in modern discourse, but he cannot make it speak in his own work. And yet madness is contemporary to his work as an other in relation to which his thought, his reasonableness, recoils. As other to his discourse, the caesura of unreason is not covered over in its withdrawal from his discourse. Its nonanswer is traced as Foucault’s language rebounds from unreason in a complete and owned inability to grasp it, articulate it, or control it.

Foucault’s thought constitutes a question that it cannot answer as it coils again at the limits of its reach. It has no authority before madness—its authority is only in the lineage of modern reason—and in this restriction it is rather more like a clearing for other and different thoughts than a reasonable grasp of the caesura of unreason that is its subject matter. If it takes its departure from this caesura, it has no originary presence, no primal experience, no founding reality. Its own order verges on the incurable nonorder of unreason and the unclosing space of its lineage. Foucault’s discourse lacks an ultimate order, and that lack ‘produces’ the self-overcoming of a constellation of thoughts that have no reason to maintain themselves as though time unfolded in a self-realizing process to which thinking was privy.

His discourse, then, does not lead to attempted cures of insanity, the containment of unreason, or the dissolution of intelligibility. It is curative in the sense that it releases the traditional fissure of unreason/reason from the anxious belief that unreason is ‘itself’ illness, immorality, or mental weakness. The caesura occurs without resolution, and like chaos, it borders the book’s meaning and good sense. The language by which madness is confronted recoils from the confrontation in the knowledge, not of unreason, but of its own limits as rational; it suggests that in facing unreason the tradition of reason may follow a process of self-overcoming or it may reconstitute unreason blindly in reasonable attempts at suppression and cure. In Foucault’s own discourse rational incorporation of unreason undergoes the self-overcoming of knowing itself, in its reasonableness, to have no power over unreason. It continuously recoils upon the otherness of madness and upon the inevitable overturning of its own good sense regarding the senselessness that it both thematizes and loses by its genealogical intelligence. The withdrawal of unreason, its caesura, engenders the self-overcoming of modern reason’s discourse.

3. A Genealogy of Genealogical Knowledge

Madness and Civilization is a genealogical account of the Other to modern reason which transgresses reason and is excluded from rationally founded discourses and relations. In contrast, The Order of Things is a genealogical account of the Same, in a lineage from the renaissance discourse of similitude and resemblance in which likenesses are found and organized by comparing like to like, to the early modern discourse in which sameness is found in the processes and structures of representation, to the modern formation of knowledge, which Foucault calls man, in which the transcendental subject of knowledge is also the principal empirical object of knowledge. In ‘man’ the sameness of knowledge is faulted by a self-founding subject that cannot represent itself or know itself in the positivity that it requires. It is always other to itself and cannot overcome this gap which puts in question its own unity. We shall see that Foucault’s genealogy finds its bearings in the fault of modern knowledge and that it forecasts a way of knowing that experiences no necessity for a genealogical approach. The idea of Same and the problematic of identity/difference, which play central roles in The Order of Things, also fade out in consequence of this genealogical study.

Foucault argues in The Order of Things that modern thought is unable to formulate a clear morality—an applied code of behavior—because its ethics is constituted by thought’s relation to itself, instead of to nature or the world, and systematically turns to itself instead of to the world as it formulates its imperatives and values (OT 128). We shall see that the Same, which guarantees a universal system of resemblance, is lost in the fractured movement from renaissance knowledge to modern knowledge and that this loss defines the disturbed problematic of late modern knowing. This problematic is similar to that of self-constitution in the sense that thought attempts to ground itself in its own activity, analogously to the self’s effort to define itself by reference to its relation to itself. Any ethical imperative will be one whereby thinking comes to its enlightenment by means of thinking’s own enactment. It works on itself to discover its own truth by its action of relating to itself. Thought posits itself in order to recover its laws, its truth, in self-enacting inquiry. If self-enactment fails in its project of recovering itself in a full unity of self-illumination, the possibility of ethics is fatally jeopardized. Having already lost its definitive bonding with nature and the world of nonthought, having defined both nature and world in its own reflexive movement, the failure of thought to complete itself in a union of subject-object means the impossibility of an ethic that defines the meaning and truth of reason-in-act.

Foucault’s genealogy of the Same emerges from this failure, repeats it to a certain degree, and overcomes it, not in the form of a new ethic, but in a formulation that makes doubtful the entire discourse of self-relation. Without an origin in nature or any other kind of continuing presence, and with the stimulus of the rupture of the modern self that destroys modernity’s best hope, Foucault’s knowledge articulates this rupture as an open field for thought. His genealogy emerges from the loss of both the Same and the problematic that originated unwittingly in its loss. He follows the loss, speaks out of it, and adopts the impossibility of definitive self-enactment that characterizes it.

We may say in an anticipatory way that the question of ethics that emerges in this and other of Foucault’s writings is a question that is embedded in his own Western tradition of thought; he follows the development of this question as he shows the decline, deterioration, and finally the failure of the idea of the Same. The problematics of self-constitution and the self-relation/self-enactment of reason grow out of the traditional thoughts of ‘reality’ and continuing presence. Those ideas have lost their power to organize Foucault’s discourse by a general and traceable loss of power in our recent history. Self-constitution and rational self-enactment are aspects of the decline of the idea of the Same and hence of the ideas of reality and continuing presence. By tracing this decline and failure, The Order of Things indirectly traces the passage of the viability of ethics to the question of ethics, and by developing his own conceptuality and language in response to this decline and failure, Foucault writes a genealogy that resists the repetition of the problematics of self-constitution and rational self-relation. By thinking within the question of ethics rather than within the problematic of self-constitution, Foucault’s work puts its own imperative and regional necessities in question and moves in a recoiling and self-overcoming movement that we shall now follow.

A. THE TEMPORALITY OF THE SAME

The word that Foucault uses to name the pervasive, organizing concept of continuing presence is Same. Its meaning dominates the structures of knowledge in the renaissance in which the similitude of all things spawns a group of discourses based not on the division between language and beings but on the continuous resemblance of beings and signs. “To search for a meaning is to bring to light a resemblance. To search for the law governing signs is to discover the things that are alike” (OT 29). For renaissance knowledge there are no essential breaks, no essential gaps among things, and hence no imperative for the thought of re-presentation. Language is within the universal field of resemblance in which the world duplicates itself endlessly in a chain of likenesses and affinities.

This kinship among signs and things, between the signifier and signified, was troubled by a growing understanding in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that language is “restricted to the general organization of representative signs” (OT 42). Increasingly, scholars wanted to know how the signifier is linked to the signified, and the question of linkage made doubtful the epistemic assumption that language merged with things by resemblance. Difference must be accounted for.

The identities of signs and the identities of things constitute differences that need to be known if language and world are to be known. The senses, however, are understood to be deceptive and unreliable, and the project of universally valid knowledge can be successful only if the human intellect functions representatively according to universally valid rules and principles. The identity of human intellect, its difference and particularity in relation to all other identities, is found in part in its universality. In Foucault’s genealogy the universally valid identity of intellect proliferates problems for modern knowledge analogous to the proliferation of signs in language designed to represent things in their truth. The emergence of these problems challenges the sovereignty of Same for knowledge. The question of the relation of signifier and signified and that of the continuous dispersion of signs and things in the function of human mentation disenfranchises the Same. Same becomes dispersed among identities and differences.

Foucault’s account of this transition from the renaissance to early modern knowledge thus focuses on the fracturing of Same by the questions of signification and representation. Same does not disappear, but it no longer controls the movement of the discourse as it did in the episteme of resemblance in which Same meant the absence of ‘real’ fissures in the fabric of being and existence. Concurrent with the dispersion of Same by the question of language’s relation to the world and its signifying structure is the recurrent issue for knowledge of how Same is to be understood in its proliferation. The question of Same in its emerging temporality in modern knowledge is found in its dispersion through identities and differences that do not make evident an easily assured universal kinship between language and things. Whereas for renaissance knowledge, for example, this kind of proliferation is found in madness, which separates language from reality, and in the caprice of imagination, which is lawless fantasy, for early modern knowledge the madman overlooks identities and differences and confuses language and things by seeing resemblance everywhere (OT 49). The distance between these two epistemes thus constitutes the beginning of the temporality of the Same which Foucault’s genealogy is designed to know. It is a temporality and knowledge that compound this distance as it functions in the formation of the modern episteme, which is formed by the problematic of representation. Temporality in Foucault’s thought is constituted by dispersion and proliferation. We shall see how temporality and Same recoil on each other in modern thought and constitute a self-overcoming movement in Foucault’s account of them.

The prominence—indeed, the organizing sovereignty—of representation in modern thought is measured by the discontinuity that becomes evident among things and signs and between language and things. Re-presentation is necessary because identities are not continuous with each other. The difficulty is compounded because the agency of re-presentation is also an identity in difference vis-à-vis other identities and because the signs that constitute language are themselves differentiated identities. In order to establish the resemblance of all things, to establish their sameness which had been a given for renaissance knowledge, people have to use signs that signify things and that signify each other. The problem is that this continuity among signs is expressed in the proliferation of signs, the endless production of differences that cannot establish finally and completely the desired unity of being.¹³

The processes of signifying and the lives of identities were characterized by dispersion and proliferation: they came to be, persisted, and passed away in growing discontinuity in spite of modern discourse’s indigenous desire to establish the sameness of being. Modern knowledges thus constituted a temporality that they desired to overcome. In the course of our discussion we shall see that Foucault’s discourse overcomes this desire as well as the knowledges that it motivated by giving priority to the temporality of dispersion and the distance that constituted these knowledges.¹⁴

The division between signs and desire grows to fatal proportions in the episteme of representation and leads to nineteenth-century organicism and historicity. Things are ordered by systems of signs in this way of knowing. Similitude lies beneath thought and is not reached in its unity by “signs [that] have no other laws than those that may govern their contents” (OT 66). One deciphers things by understanding signifying relations. Representation is “the mode of being” that defines the being of all things. But since the “disequilibrium” among signs, by which one knows, and things, which are hidden in their nonrepresentational being, is constitutive of representation, similitude’s being—the very unity of being—is made more remote. Such disequilibrium is “contemporaneous” with representing, is part of the “common ground” of representing, and is thus a temporal constituent of the system of signs. Although it could not have been known by the episteme of representation, this contemporaneity had the effect of unsettling representational projects by holding at an infinite distance the goal of unity that defined the projects. Knowledges were condemned to begin again and again—finding their end-point only in the beginning—by the division that defined them.

Further, the power and ‘body’ of desire occur outside the limits of representation. Although desire can be represented and analyzed, it is not ruled by representation. In this episteme desire is understood as “libertinage” to the extent that it overflows representational structures (OT 209). Bodies in their mere conjunction express the ungraspable excess of desire. The endless project of containing desire in representation, and the futility of that project, finds its clearest expression in Sade, who writes within the transgressive limits of representation and comes to know the limits of representation in its cruelty and denial regarding the ‘otherness’ of desire. Desire names a moving power of organisms, a power that expresses lives that are outside the circumference of representation. The question is, how are organisms to be known in their power and structure, in their internal relations, as they mark their division from the life and internal structures of representing? In order to answer that question, one needs to know organisms as they function in their internal relations.

Organic structures in this episteme are discontinuous and cannot be ordered in a table of unbroken similarities or a system of signs. Their emergence into knowledge creates a “new space of empiricities” within which one develops methods to study functions specific to a given kind of organism, whether it be a living being, an economy, or a grammar. The temporal issue in this late modern episteme is one of succession. How do organic systems lead to other organic systems? What are the influences of one on another in the succession? How does one set of interrelated structures develop or evolve out of others? History, not a field of representation, is the field of laws and regulations within which organic relations appear. Instead of representational duplication, one finds origins, lines of generation, and forms of life that are exterior to representation. Things are understood as “withdrawn into their own essence, taking up their place at last within the force that animates them, within the organic structure that maintains them, within the genesis that has never ceased to produce them. . . . The very being of that which is represented is now going to fall outside representation itself” (OT 239, 240). The problem is to find ways of knowing the source and origin of representation.

One approach to this problem was to determine “the transcendental field in which the subject, which is never given to experience (since it is not empirical), determines . . . all the formal conditions of experience in general” (OT 243). This is a field of synthesis for representations that cannot be known by representations. A second option focuses on the force of labor, the energy of life, or the power of speech, which are also outside the field of representation but which condition whatever is known. In the first option, the subject is divided from the mode of the object’s being; in the second, the forms of analysis are divided from the laws that give unity to the organic structure. These fractures are contemporaneous with nineteenth-century organicism and historicism and define its temporality, but they lie outside of what either approach can know.

In discussing the rupturing movement from the episteme of representation to that of organicism and transcendental thought, Foucault is admittedly tentative. He frequently reformulates his account of the rupture, acknowledges that he is still within its power and is unable to get a definitive grip on it (see especially OT 218, 237, 239, 248). The growing distance between the forms that empirical objects take in their analyses and the conditions for knowing them is clearly at work in this book. The importance of linear history is still powerful. Yet Foucault is thinking about the rupturing distances in the ongoing transition from pre-nineteenth-century modernity, distances that continue in the twentieth century and in his thought. He thinks in them by defining his own approach by reference neither to sequence nor to evolution but to the lineage of fractures and the contemporaneity of dispersion. The “structures of positivities” that he finds are themselves adrift from the earlier principles of order that established identity and difference in tables of representation. These structures have emerged in the dissolution of the orders of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century knowledge and are also, by their own account, separated from the very positivities that they structure: life, labor, and language.

In this field, the possibility of synthesis is detached from the space of representation and mathematical tabulation. Foucault’s own narrative is one that situates itself in these fractures which cannot be subject to narratives, but which operate to dislodge in his knowledge any predisposition to universalization, organic structural truth, or a priority of narration. One becomes accustomed in his work to know without foundation, without appeal to any continuing natural structures. As a product of fractures, his knowledge proliferates and recoils in the fractures contemporaneous with it. Power, will, and life do not name the hidden movement or limit of anything. They name the effects of combinations and configurations. Desire no longer names a limit or an essence but a movement of certain historical bodies. Foucault’s is a knowledge in which the contemporary ending of nineteenth-century thought recoils on itself.

Foucault finds now, in the wake of the nineteenth century, that the disciplines of knowledge are faced with the contemporaneous “impossibility and obligation” to locate syntheses in the space of representation and to open up the transcendental field of the subject (OT 250). Contemporaneity in this case is constituted by the loss of the episteme of representation, the fragmentation of the unity of representation by transcendental and empirical divisions, the demand for the synthesis of transcendental and empirical thought, and the impossibility of meeting that demand. Such contemporaneity constitutes what Foucault terms man. Man, the knowing being, is the being of time when time is understood as dispersion. These fragments of impossibility and obligation constitute the being of man. Foucault’s own knowledge apprehends these structures in their historical development and in their contemporaneity with their constitutive fractures. That means that his knowledge of his traditional historical development rebounds away from the concept of development, which has formed a strong resistance to fractures and the absence of the development that they disclose. His use of the concept of development feels the impact of the power-effects of the unappropriated fractures in the discourse of evolution and representation. These fractures put in question the ideas of both origin, linear history, and teleology. Development without origin or telos—fractural development—as we shall see in the next section, marks a break from the nineteenth-century episteme of lawful, ontological history and that of understanding organic structures as unities with natures that are internal to themselves.

What happens to the recent understanding of language in Foucault’s discourse? Out of the nineteenth-century study of the historicity of grammar and its organic, self-referential manner come both the divisions among grammatical systems and the break from the continuity of fields of representation. The dominant nineteenth-century knowledge of grammar found the “time systems” of different grammars to be system-specific instead of being derivative from continuous Time, which repeats itself in endless representation. Modalities of formation dominated the chronology of successions. ‘History’ rather than representational time began to form (OT 290). “The order of time is beginning,” Foucault says (OT 293). History is the field within which certain mutations will or will not be able to occur. “The new grammar is immediately diachronic.” The central diachronic aspect arises from the dissociation of language from what it represents; it is intelligible, not by representing something other than itself, but by its historical development and “its own particular legality” (OT 294).

This understanding perpetuates the break from representation by the effort to know language in its empirical divisions and in the discontinuous sequence of temporal development. Its intelligibility is made possible in part by the fractures that it incorporates. History is the organizing concept, and unique organic structure is the dominant functional image. Foucault, in seeming continuity with nineteenth-century historicism and organicism, understands language by its regional quality in the power of its dispersions. Conditions for the nineteenth-century study of language, dispersion and proliferation—conditions that are largely overlooked in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—become Foucault’s organizing thought. Hence time as dispersion rather than history and structures of fragmentation rather than organic unities transpose his thought out of historicist organicism. The importance of a universalizing ground is dissipated by this mutation, and with this passage, the question of the transcendental/empirical connection (that is, man) also disappears. The structures of intelligibility regarding things are also in a process of mutation. Instead of a mathematical or anthropological basis, Foucault’s intelligibility rests on the dispersion of time, a thought that first begins to take shape in The Order of Things.

He does, however, “disturb the words” that he uses, an approach that he notes as an exegetical technique in the nineteenth century. Language has an “enigmatic density” that is excessive of the general grammar that explains it. Disturbing language means “denouncing the grammatical habits of our thinking, . . . dissipating the myths that animate our words, . . . rendering once more noisy and audible the element of silence that all discourse carries with it as it is spoken.” Nietzsche and Freud are notable expositors in this tradition. Foucault is like them when he maximizes those phrases that both “support and . . . undermine our apparent discourse, our fantasies, our dreams, our bodies” (OT 298). Syntax, tyrannical modes of speech, and the silent priorities of our thoughts are shifted, pushed off-center, and destroyed in their unquestionable ordering power. Foucault does not “go beyond the frontiers of experience,” as both nineteenth-century transcendental thought and empiricism tried to do, but turns rather to the dispersed and fragmented manner of language as he finds it. In this sense he temporalizes language outside the limits of representation, historicity, organic structure, and anthropomorphism.

As he formalizes the epistemic lineages into eras, strata, distinguishable discourses, and delimited transformations, Foucault uses a language that fragments as it formalizes. This is a procedure that is unfinished and unsure of itself.¹⁵ But he clearly eliminates the structure of problems that dominates both transcendental phenomenology and structuralism as he works in a discourse within which the inherited language of meaning, empiricism, and transcendental thought is transgressed by the language of dispersed time. In this sense his language is closer to that of literature, which manifests “a language which has no other law than that of affirming—in opposition to all other forms of discourse—its own precipitous existence” (OT 300), than it is to criticism in its efforts to make the language of literature intelligible by categorical functions that operate in ignorance of its own fractured density.

Foucault’s language does not suggest something like an eternal return to its own being. The thoughts of the being of language or of language as a self-enclosed process are foreign to his emphasis on institutions and nonlinguistic practices. Yet his language does hold foremost its own scattered density and returns to this density in the knowledge that this language is transgressed and subdued by it. This language is not universal in its self-constraint or in the unity of its regulations. But writing in the “enigmatic multiplicity” of language that characterizes our lineage and that was given self-conscious expression by Nietzsche, Foucault sidesteps the project of mastery that characterizes both philosophy and philology—“the themes of universal formalization of all discourse, or the themes of an integral exegesis of the world . . . or those of a general theory of signs; or again, the theme . . . of a transformation without residuum” (OT 305)—he sidesteps such projects and writes a discourse of dispersed time that puts in question the language that has promised unity and universal meaning by projecting itself on the world.

Foucault combines Nietzsche’s question “who is speaking?” with Mallarmé’s reply that the word speaks and means nothing in its “fragile vibration” (OT 305). Foucault notes that the distance between this question and reply has not been thought, but has been overlooked because of a preoccupation with what language is and how it orders itself in its plenitude. His own studies maximize the distance between the question and the response, however, by analyzing the formations of discourses in their languages, institutions, and ways of living. These discourses carry finite inevitabilities and form individuals as subjects. Discourses speak, Foucault says to Nietzsche. They speak without origins or foundations. They articulate confederations of power and the fractures carried by such confederations. They effect power and are the consequence of other power-effects. He shows in an enlarged elaboration of Mallarme that in their transgressions and fractured totalities these discourses mean nothing but their effects and formations. Lacking ‘being’, they exist as bodies, ways of doing things, rank orders, systems of distribution, means of elimination, and plays of force. The distance between “who is speaking?” and the meaningless existence of the word is found in Foucault’s discourse of dispersed time which traces the dispersions that have effected a discourse in which he is constrained to live out the uncertainty of language, its meaninglessness—a discourse whose own heritage is found in the multiple losses of self-understanding, self-reference, and orders of knowledge. These losses arise from the defining structures and engender the dispersion that gives them their temporality. Rather than master the schisms and make language visible in its entirety, Foucault maintains an uncertainty and questionableness that keep the schisms alive in the constraint of having to inquire without knowing origins, being, or ends.

4. Fragmented Man

Man, the subject of knowledge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is produced out of the fractured renaissance and modern epistemes, out of their transitions, ruptures, and emerging problems. It is a subject whose epistemological failure produces the temporality of dispersion in Foucault’s discourse in The Order of Things. His genealogy arises out of and gives expression to this temporality; it takes form as a knowledge in which ethical thinking is in question. By his account of ‘man’, the subject of modern knowledge, Foucault exhibits the epistemic structure whose problematic and failure define the space of his account of man. He also provides an account of the way of knowing that is most likely to inform those interpretations which read him as though he were wholly within the broad ethical discourse of Western self-constitution. Foucault’s work in The Order of Things shows what may be hardest for us to believe: that the way of valuing that inspires us most easily in both secular and religious commitments, that our ‘best’ interests for the common good of ‘mankind’, find their credibility in the divided and ultimately suicidal structure of modern knowledge.

Such subjectivity—man—constitutes a division that expresses the inevitability of its own passage out of its ‘nature’. If this self-overcoming is repressed or overlooked we may expect repetitions of its mortality in values and value judgments that reinstate in the name of good things their opposites. A spirit of violence accompanies the repression, a sensibility that will not understand its own mischief as it repeats itself and unwittingly resists its self-overcoming. If man in its fragmentation appropriates its fragmentation and affirms its self-overcoming, the cycle of violence prompted by modern ethics may be interrupted and the space may emerge for thought that is genealogical and experimental. This opening can occur in spite of the expectation—which seems intuitive and proper—of passionate commitment and self-constitution. This mix of fragmentation and self-overcoming in our heritage, which we find to be the voice of the question of ethics, is also the voice that provides the most characteristic and counterintuitive movement in The Order of Things. It is the voice that emerges in the ending of modern knowledge and its ethics.

In the previous section we saw that Foucault’s questions regarding language, and his experiments with it, arose out of the fragmentation of language in a movement from the episteme of similitude to the episteme of representation and from thence to the historicist organicism of the nineteenth century. These discourses speak in the formation of subjects of knowledge that are intrinsically fragmented by the discourses and yet are prefigured by the power of the problematic of the Same to overlook their fragmentation. Foucault finds his language and thought emerging out of this overlooked fragmentation, and by that anarchic birth he finds himself in a discourse without an originary presence to link the divided parts. He does not constitute himself in this discourse, but is constituted by it as the project of self-constitution and the ideal of universalization fall apart within it. The subject of knowledge is subjected to processes of thinking that put in question the authoritative subjectivation of totalizing or normalizing authorities; these authorities proliferated knowledges and practices in ignorance of their own dispersion. Hence the aim of definitive and synthetic knowledge, the ideal of enlightenment, is destroyed by what at first appears to be enlightenment through genealogy. The latter “enlightenment” recoils upon the unthought shadow of modern knowledge, to the density and ambiguity of language and the definitive divisions that characterize the subject whose mission is to provide unity. Foucault’s genealogy knows itself to lack a basis for unity in the inevitability of fragmentation that moves through its own lineage.

Man is the subject that represents its representations. Instead of a renaissance table of representations in the episteme of similitude, man is the being who folds its own nature back on itself as it duplicates and expresses what it finds through its own activity of representing. Its sequence of representations takes place in its activity, and that sequence of self-repetitions constitutes both its time and the ‘place’ of all things. If we can know the activity of compounded representations, we can know the presentation of truth and the order of things. But that knowledge would be a representation that re-establishes the rupture of difference by the force of the re. Man must be the sole object and subject of such knowledge; that is, the representational chain needs to be broken by pure, self-knowing presentation. And the impossibility of such knowing, of such presentational immediacy, is exactly what gave rise to this subject of knowledge, to this act of representation.

Man, in spite of its goal to provide unity, means discontinuity between itself and what it knows. Foucault calls it the enslaved king who is the sovereign of knowledge and the impossible object of knowledge, the one who must know itself in its immediate unity and who, trapped by its representational activity, knows itself only as a representation, never as the pre-representational unity that it has to be. Man can only know itself by reducing itself by deduction to an abstract necessity. Surely man is the Same, the link between subject and object. But in this rational hope it repeats the question that gave it birth: What is the immediate linkage that unites being and knowledge? Representation assumed this linkage, but needed to find and found it. Man was the intended foundation, but it found itself, as the condition for the possibility of its founding activity, to be at a distance from itself—a distance no less great than that of the nineteenth-century object of knowledge from nature. Being was still a question, lost in the finitude of a repetitive circle of representation.

Man thus composes its own limitation. Its finitude is not defined by external limitations placed on its ability to know, but by the internal limits of self-representation. Finite man is the condition of its own possibility in spite of its project of establishing an incontestable identity for all things. Finitude is the Same for man, its representational being, that makes inevitable a continuous succession of images that promise but cannot fulfill a presentational immediacy as the basis for certainty. Rather, finitude is both man’s certainty and its failure to be an unbroken truth for all things. The Same recurs ironically as the repetition of the failure of certainty, and the continuous passing away of pure subjectivity marks its temporality. Man’s death, in this sense, is the ‘nature of its being’.

As Foucault makes his case for the episteme of man in the context of transitions in modern knowledge, he writes in a language that neither returns to itself as a literary absolute nor posits an object that must be known if his discourse is to have validity. He writes in the distance that is created by the movement of representation in the sense that instead of attempting to recover either the retreating object of knowledge or the Same that links subject and object, his thought is organized by the schisms and fractures that constitute modern knowledge. The recoiling movement of modern knowledge occurs as the represented unity rebounds in dispersion. Foucault’s recoils occur as the constitutive gaps of modern knowledge rebound, as the distances that positively define his knowledge open as other than distances to be overcome. His knowledge provides no basis from which to project unity on the dispersed things that are known by the inherited divisions of methods and disciplines. Genealogy has no claim to unity of succession or order. Its procedures and regulations coil again and move away from themselves, not with the aim of repeating themselves in an establishing action, but in a continuing, affirmed proliferation that is open to radical transformation and to newly generated styles and thoughts. It recoils in and from the self-identification and the satisfaction that characterize the Western projects of self-relation and self-reflection. Recognizing modern ethics to be a project of self-constitution by means of self-representation, and recognizing self to be a discursive, normalizing function with no essence other than the effects that have made it, Foucault’s knowledge is as thoroughly self-overcoming as Nietzsche’s.

With the rupture of representation organizing it, Foucault’s knowledge does not look for a return to essence or origin or right. It attends rather to the dissolution from which it emerges and anticipates its own dissolution in the formations to which it gives rise. In his thought no identity seeks itself, is imminent or near to itself, liberates itself by proper self-appropriation, or fulfills itself. His analysis of these characteristics of modern thought is without a teleology. In the without we find both his inheritance and his thought of no origin, no essence, no completion (OT 338-40). Modern thought and practice have sought the liberation of people from whatever stifles the realization of their common nature and selfhood. Foucault’s liberation occurs in the death of this project.

Both “Man and His Doubles” and “The Human Sciences” in The Order of Things analyze the deterioration of man within the force of that deterioration. The episteme of the Same is perpetuated if finitude, desire, or language becomes the new Same by which human being draws nearer to its lost other, if language closes on itself and becomes a single field of relation and lost relation, if experience is its own condition, or if the other is taken as a nearing-distancing Same. The unveiling of Same provides the context for Foucault’s efforts. ‘Doubles’ (e.g., near-distance, being-other, identity-difference) shadow this thinking and put in question the thought of rupture that constitutes both them and Foucault’s account of them. Man’s self-overcoming passage, its ending, is the force of his thought: “It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man’s disappearance. For this void does not create a deficiency; it does not constitute a lacuna that must be filled. It is nothing more, and nothing less, than the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think” (OT 342).

What happens in this space? In one development, man is the object of knowledge in the empirical sciences; it is the living being studied in modern biology, the problem of wealth studied in modern economics, and the maker and user of language studied in modern linguistics. Man, the object of study, appeared in these empirical sciences as the basis for empirical, nonproblematic knowledge, knowledge that did not need transcendental founding. Linkages among data are established by causal and structural constants. In another development, mathematical and physical sciences link evident or verified propositions by deductive connections. In a third development, philosophical reflection attempts to provide a common place for empirical investigations, to define the being characteristic of the various regions of investigation, and to formalize thought in a clear and universal language. These developments, in their considerable complexity, intensify the regionalization and proliferation of knowledges. Man the transcendental figure is diminished by figuring in only the third aspect of modern knowledge, and this knowledge is but one of the three major dimensions of the emerging, empirical knowledges of man. It is marginalized by the other knowledges that characterize its time. What enables man to know what life is? What is the essence of labor and its laws? What enables man to speak? The human sciences, in the absence of a clear, founding subject, seek to connect the sciences that produce, in their different domains, knowledge of man. In short, the issue for the human sciences is man’s ability to represent itself to itself. Is there a unity for the different knowledges? Is man-the-object founded in a common subject?

In attempting to find access to man, now so dispersed by its knowledges, the human sciences experimented with functions, norms, conflicts, rules, signification, and systems. Among these things surely a unifying knowledge could be established that would define the manner of self-representation that is common to man. In the decline of the role of consciousness in nineteenth-century empiricism, in addition to the epistemically mandated distance of man-the-foundational-subject from man-the-object-of-knowledge, a new factor emerged as a possible unity: the unconscious. The activity of representing had remained beyond the grasp of nineteenth-century transcendental thought and in that sense had remained functionally unconscious in spite of the project of self-comprehension. Transcendental thought always promised a future consciousness that never occurred in its immediacy: “the near but withdrawn presence of the origin” (OT 362). Consciousness and representation are held apart in the “space of man,” and this dissociation is definitive for the human sciences, just as it was for transcendental philosophy. “So the human sciences speak only within the element of the representable, but in accordance with a conscious/unconscious dimension, a dimension that becomes more and more marked as one attempts to bring the order of systems, rules, and norms to light” (OT 363). This dimension does not eliminate the importance of representation, but supplements and defines it. The problematic of the eighteenth-century episteme of representation remains in the internal division of man as the unconscious basis of conscious activity and is explained and elaborated by theories of the unconscious.

This entire development is constituted by “the general arrangement of the episteme that provides [the human sciences] with a site, summons them, and establishes them—thus enabling them to constitute man as their object” (OT 364). What does Foucault accomplish by this claim? He, too, thinks in this space that he characterizes as man’s. He, too, is preoccupied by rules, norms, and systems. He, too, proliferates knowledges by his contingently connected genealogies. Yet man is neither the subject nor the object of his analysis. The space of man, the overlooked hiatus that marks the problem of man’s knowledge, and the episteme that produces man are the subjects of Foucault’s account. This space has formed Foucault’s problematic, and it offers no possibility of solution, but rather only the continuation of dissolving the episteme that it defines. Such dissolution is the process one undergoes in reading The Order of Things. Historicist organicism, regional empiricism, preoccupation with the knower, the issues of universalization, the question of human nature, the relation of human being and nature, the status of the empirical: all these hallmarks of late modernity form Foucault’s discourse in their conflicts and possibilities. None of these hallmarks, however, nor all of them together, establish Foucault’s discourse. Rather, the rupture that problematizes them, moves them, and places them, functions in Foucault’s genealogy as the moving force, not as something to be overcome, but as the discourse’s continuing voice. As man passes away in this thought, Foucault’s discourse finds its life and a future that it cannot desire to predict. This process, and not a group of values and goals outside of it, is Foucault’s thought. It is the process of man’s hiatus. In the space of that hiatus, something like a middle voice speaks.

The hiatus is not the same thing as finitude within the many versions of modern discourse. In that discourse finitude names the limits that appear in the interstices of self-relation: death, desire, and law. In psychoanalysis, for example, the relations of representation and finitude come into play as it shows the region of the unconscious “where representation remains in suspense, on the edge of itself, open, in a sense, to the closed boundary of finitude.” The impossibility of man’s being its own foundation or even constituting its own origins emerges as “the three figures by means of which life, with its functions and norms, attains its foundation in the mute repetition of Death, conflicts and rules their foundation in the naked opening of Desire, significations and systems their foundation in a language which is at the same time Law” (OT 374). Finitude in this instance emerges as the unfounded possibility of the goal of foundational certainty that in the several versions of modern knowledge proliferated and fractured man. Finitude underscores the slippage of self-representation and self-constitution, the schiz that makes impossible the projects of the modern episteme. But the meaning of finitude is found nonetheless within the boundaries of foundational thought and its epistemological and ethical motivations. It is found not in the hiatus, but within the boundaries marked by the disciplined exclusion of the hiatus from our orders of knowledge and action.

The disciplined and ordered exclusion of the hiatus is shown by the mirror of nineteenth- and twentieth-century madness, whose archetype is “schizophrenia,” the divided mind (or the mind of division). This name for what is most foreign to our normalcy designates language that eludes signification, the wild state of desire, and the dominion of death over all psychological functions and the rules of rationality. We see “welling up that which is, perilously, nearest to us—as if, suddenly, the very hollowness of our existence is outlined in relief; the finitude upon the basis of which we are, and think, and know, is suddenly there before us: an existence at once real and impossible, thought that we cannot think, an object for our knowledge that always eludes it” (OT 375). Finitude stands outside our knowledge, permeating it at the same time, and in psychoanalysis (as well as ethnology) it makes questionable the man of knowledge who must found itself by its own activity of self-representation. Finitude is the wedge by which our knowledge’s excluded limits began the splitting and ending of man. It is a phenomenon of modernity that is structured by the exclusion of the hiatus in a web of knowledge and action that cannot know its own divisions and remain true to itself.

Whereas psychoanalysis, as a practice, unfolds finitude into a knowledge by which an individual represents his or her being to him or herself as a creation of desire, death, and law, Foucault’s genealogical knowledge works within the effects of their exclusion. In The Order of Things he can bring the question of the limits only this far: he can build a knowledge in which the intersection of unconscious discursive development and individual choice, which arises from the discourse in a given situation, are delineated in a language that is organized by the disordering elements of its own lineage (OT 380-81). A prominent word in this knowledge is exposure. It is a “counterscience,” not a human science, that maximizes the disturbances that have shaken the structures of its own heritage, made doubtful the best inherited knowledge, and made possible the demise of the order that has held at bay its own divisive furies. Finitude also comes to an end in this exposing counterscience, because death, desire, and law no longer break in as abnormal things to be known with cautious and distant clarity; rather, they constitute the movement of thought and writing. We find even their names waning as the force of their exclusion weakens and no Same appears to provide a sustaining presence for finitude’s interruptions. The language of finitude recoils on itself in Foucault’s genealogy and springs away in a language without foundation and hence without finitude. Time without finitude? A different thought emerges.

In The Order of Things the fading of the knowledge of man and the lineage of that fading define the possibility of Foucault’s own project. In contrast to modern ethnology, to studies of ethea, of different ways of knowing and living, his genealogy has no privileged basis for comparing and evaluating successes and failures relative to a higher and universalizable culture. He finds impossible a new self, now liberated from old restrictions and repressions, a self that would reconstitute itself in a fulfillment. Self-constitution as a form of self-representation is radically in doubt, not because Foucault wishes it so, but because the lineage of self-constitution makes it so. Exposures of the unconscious war on lack of unity and presence, on unhealable division and proliferation, on anomie and beginning without origin have put in relief, not evils, but the excluded limits of these formations out of which we have formed the thought and lives of selfhood and subjectivity.

By displaying the lineage of his own work, Foucault has placed his thought in the “hollowness” and gaps of his own time, thus giving place to an expectation of radical transformation from within his knowledge. By following the fissures in his lineage’s search for broken unity, he has given a series of accounts in The Order of Things that recoil in their language back on the marginalized openings to absence of unity and presence; further, these accounts recoil away from structures and movements of knowledge and practice that tend toward the continuous reestablishment of unity and presence. Since all forms of self-representation have come into question in his discourse, the possibility for ethical thought and action has also come into question. Foucault’s exposure of this question, which appears to be an unconscious characteristic of his heritage, raises the possibility of thought and action that are not based on representation in any form. This is a space for experimentation in the ending of man, a space of uncertainty and suspicion regarding our lineage’s wisdom and goodness, and a space in which one cannot know who one is “meant” to be as one attempts to overcome the pain and suffering that individuals undergo in the destinies of their time.

5. Games of Truth, the Ethical Subject

Foucault’s description of the relations among knowledges and power shows that what people know to be true and how they influence and control each other—the power that they exercise with regard to each other—are inseparably linked. When a system of knowledge/power closes on itself and functions to reestablish itself in a way that prevents thorough readjustment and transformation, totalization and domination result. In this context Foucault prefers a minimum of domination. This minimum does not mean an absence of power, but continuous readjustments within a culture of the rules of law, the techniques of management, the ethos by which individuals conduct themselves, “a sort of open strategic game, where things can be reversed” (EC 18). The openness of a culture is found in the changeableness of its hierarchies and the liberty that constitutes it and is ignored by the insistent stabilities of relationships and knowledges. When those who are subjected, for example, organize themselves and their relations so that governing principles arise with regard to their needs and not to those of the controlling groups, the values and customs change within the culture by means of needs and powers that are part, if usually an ignored part, of that culture. The peripheral values of the subgroup overcome those of dominant groups from within the society, and the society’s openness is found in the dispersing and volatile factors that constitute and effect reversals within it.

Our study has shown that Foucault’s own discourse embodies this process of self-overcoming in which the effects of traditional controlling forces follow processes of recoiling that not only reorganize our inherited values but also put in question the enduring validity of the principles by which the recoiling takes place. One consequence is that the idea and experience of self as a self-realizing basis of value is doubtful and that the project of self-constitution is put in question as its epistemic assumption of the founding quality of representation transposes into one of genealogical self-overcoming. The significance of minimizing domination is found in the language of self-overcoming in which the search for totalizing values loses its attraction.

Foucault’s exposure of what is ignored in specific lineages is one of the moving forces of his work. Its effect is to show how rules of knowledge and relations of power have held in force certain kinds of suffering and, above all, certain limits of freedom that are catastrophic for groups of individuals. A society’s investment in such suffering and limits is articulated in types of knowledge, situations of action, and character formations that are justified without regard to the dominance of their own interest or to their temporality. The critical dimension of Foucault’s thought challenges these patterns of domination by exposing them. Another dimension encourages freedom from domination by the liberations incurred through exposure. And a third puts to work the process by which the liberty of self-overcoming governs the “games” of power and truth that have held people in check. In Foucault’s work the language of exposure, as we have seen, is itself structured by self-overcoming recoils. Is self-overcoming a new discipline of self-relation? We have seen that his subject matter is not a self or subject, but combinations of texts, practices, and forces. The language of self-representation does not organize his thought.

Further, by developing his analysis of governmentality, Foucault intended to expand the area of investigation beyond the scope of individual rights and self-relation. Governmentality names “the totality of practices by which one can constitute, define, organize, instrumentalize the strategies which individuals in their liberty can have with regard to each other” (EC 19). Not self-constitution or self-formation, but a network of practices, knowledges, and techniques is the field within which people become subjects. By elaborating the lineage of various aspects of governmentality, such as population control and welfare for all citizens, Foucault continues to set aside both the priority of the self and the nineteenth-century thought of representation in his account of the formation of the subject. The heritage of the care of self is the aspect of governmentality that Foucault began to describe before his death. It is an account that speaks out of the question of ethics and that makes impossible a new ethic of self-constitution within the parameters of his discourse.

Foucault will not call processes of liberation from domination a work of the self upon the self. Such language has the danger of referring “to the idea that there does exist a nature or a human foundation which, as a result of a certain number of historical, social or economic processes, found itself concealed, alienated or imprisoned in and by some repressive mechanism” (EC 2). Rather, he defines his problem in terms of the interplay of truths and powers that congeal into seemingly unalterable structures of living and “prevent all reversibility” (EC 3). In this emphasis the priority of the subject is also reversed, and the subject is found to derive from games of truth and power. “I had to reject a certain a priori theory of the subject in order to make this analysis of the relationships which can exist between the constitution of the subject or different forms of the subject and games of truth, practices of power, and so forth” (EC 10). Rather than being identical with itself, the subject takes shape in those processes by which individual behavior is directed and truth is formed within specific patterns of knowledge and validation. Rather than providing an analysis of the contingency of the subject, for example, Foucault shows how relations of power and knowledge are both regionally definitive and ultimately unstable. Rather than contending that freedom is a characteristic of human subjectivity, he locates freedom in the reversibility, instability, and problematic formation of the relations of knowledge and power in patterns of direction and influence. Reversibility and instability characterize the processes by which we come to be who we are. This account of reversibility constitutes a reversal within the discourse of subjectivity that plays a major role in Foucault’s inheritance, and, as we have seen, it is a reversal that arises from the discourse’s own instability.

Games of truth are the interplay of rules, principles, and methods whereby people know themselves and other things. Games of power are constituted by the ways people direct and influence behaviors. Both types of games constitute the discourse whereby, in our tradition, the self worked upon itself to make a certain kind of being. Self-transformations arise from and perpetuate the complex interplays of knowledge and power by which, for example, people determine what are acceptable, pleasurable, and passionate relations with each other.

The formations of games of truth are continually emphasized in Foucault’s work. According to Madness and Civilization, people recognized madness in themselves and others within specific structures of knowledge and practice, whether the ‘game’ be one in which the mad revealed God’s grace or were instances of malformation that are correctable by medical intervention. Although The Order of Things does not underscore the power aspect of epistemes, it, too, shows that the empirical and human sciences are constituted by complex plays of rules and principles that are volatile (open to transformation in their instabilities) and traceable in their mutations. That study leads to Foucault’s account of punitive practices in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in which the criminal and his or her correction are knowable within the given ‘game’ or episteme. These games of truth and error define both academic knowledge and popular social knowledge. People think of and experience themselves and others in them, develop institutions to advance truth and correct error within the game’s domain, and create normal and deviant behaviors, as well as right and wrong bodies of knowledge, within the game’s parameters. Games of truth make possible self-recognization and cultural recognization, forceful recognizations in which one knows, for example, that oneself or the other is mad or authoritative or normal.

In his trilogy on the history of sexuality, particularly in The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, Foucault asks, “What were the games of truth by which human beings came to see themselves as desiring individuals?” (UP 7) How did people come to think of themselves and to experience themselves as subjects of desire? Human being came to be recognized by reference to desire, and the formation of this truth, of this game, was a heritage by which the self became the object of its dominant concern. In this game, the individual had to constitute itself as a kind of subject that occurs as self-relation. Self-constitution was the name of the game.

How is it that Foucault’s thought is not itself a new kind of self-constitution? His studies, he says, are endeavors to find “to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently” (UP 9). Their value is found in a knowledge in which he “strays afield from himself.” “There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.” This is a “game with oneself” (UP 8). Foucault appropriates the game aspect of truth and power that constitutes, if blindly, his tradition and allows the discourse of truth to overcome itself in his thinking: by finding itself a game of truth—finding its truth—the truth discourse recoils from its own conditions for being true, or such conditions as universality, continuing presence, self-founding, self-representation, and self-disclosure. But does this recoil demand nonetheless a new kind of selfhood? A new ethical subject?

Ascesis is the word Foucault uses to describe his philosophical thought: “Ascesis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought” (UP 9). Becoming free of what one silently thinks, from the subjectivization and behavioral effects of given ways of knowing and living that constitute one’s identity, is the ascetic activity that Foucault has in mind. Transformation of one’s mode of being is also the goal of the “practices of the self” that Foucault analyzes in his final trilogy. The emphasis in that discourse is on “the forms of relation with self, on the methods and techniques by which he works them out, on the exercises by which he makes of himself an object to be known, and on the practices that enable him to transform his own mode of being” (UP 30). One trains in order to gain self-mastery for the successful practice of virtue in relation to oneself as well as to others. By careful training one becomes a moral subject and, in the history of this type of self-mastery, the individual becomes the object of training whereby his or her self is developed into a self-forming subject whose intention is to be good by the internalized, governing standards that tell the self who it is to become. In its full Western development, moral ascesis is articulated as a definitive representation of the self to itself, a representation which, when lived, is considered to be true freedom. Foucault, in naming his thought ascetic, ironizes his interplay with the tradition. In a Nietzschean move of self-overcoming he ascetically trains his knowledge to move through and beyond the self-mastery that formed the moral self. Moral self-mastery in this context recoils on itself and springs away from itself.

The knowledge that informs this experience of self-overcoming freedom constitutes a game of truth. It is made of rules and descriptions, regimes ruled by codes of behavior, prescriptions that put into practice certain formulas and beliefs regarding the self. But the liberty of individuals to develop all manner of codes and knowledges and to give them governing power by accounts of prescriptive origins and foundations—that liberty becomes a threat to the particular authorizing knowledge. This liberty is underwritten only by the limits and transgressions of knowledge, not by the substance of knowledge. It is found in the discontinuities and ruptures of discourses. The formation of the self as a self-representing subject is in question by virtue of its liberty not only because of the content of its knowledge but also because of its form. We saw in the last section that the form of self-representation emerged from the episteme of representation that could not deal adequately, on its own terms, with either its proliferation of knowledges or the relation between the knower and the known. In The History of Sexuality we find that the human subject emerges in Western thought as the subject of desire that finds itself within a lineage of caring for itself. How is it to use itself in its pleasures? How is it to regulate itself, form itself, be itself?

Self-relation is a structure that loses its power in Foucault’s thought. His training, his ascesis, is one that recoils in the training that formed the ethical subject, a training which has been a silent presence in his tradition and his thought. Self-representation means subjectivation and inevitable denial of liberty. Foucault cannot propose another form of self-representation or self-constitution without returning to the formation that his work puts in question. His asceticism is found in a training that eliminates the ethical subject.

Further, liberty as he defines it cannot find its expression in a better ethical subject. It is articulated in a self-overcoming that blindly characterizes his lineage and that is exposed and appropriated by his thought. We have seen that liberty does not name a property of human nature, but the continuous reversibility and substitutability of things. The liberty of the subject, for example, is not found primarily as freedom of choice or as an anxious relation of subjectivity to an infinite other. It is found in part as the historical and optional development of self-constitution.

Self-constitution, Foucault shows in The History of Sexuality, is formed in a history of problematizations regarding human conduct. One conducts oneself according to prescriptive ensembles that various “mediating agencies” prescribe, such as family, educational institutions, and religious bodies. The emphasis on self-conduct that emerged in the West arose concurrently with the formation of an agency that constituted itself in accord with the prescriptions. In our early history, Foucault finds, individuals did not, strictly speaking, constitute themselves. They externally met external standards, and the question of being a moral self did not arise. One either did or did not do the prescribed thing. His genealogy of the transformation of our culture into an internally directed one, instead of one directed by the external authority of the ruler or custom, is also a genealogy of the formation of the self-constituting subject whereby the self represents itself to itself. Previously the ruling power was reflected back to itself by the conforming behavior of the ruled. Forming the self, however, became the dominant practice. Internal states of mind, internal transformation of desire, internal conformity to certain principles became the ‘practice’ for individuals. How the self related to itself defined the individual’s identity. This massive cultural project of self-mastery, this program of training that Foucault calls ascetic, gives rise to the agency that defines itself by its self-regulation.

Foucault’s work rises out of a self-constituting self as much as does our reading of him. How are we to understand this project of self-overcoming that takes place in a context of ethical subjectivity? What is the problem that allows the formation of a knowledge that puts in question the power and value of self-constitution? Although the specific context of Foucault’s last work is that of sexual desire and the normativity that created moral perversion and the denial of many forms of erotic pleasure, the larger problem is that of the formation of knowledges and relations of power that created an agency which must and yet cannot give a complete account of itself: it is a problem of totalization and liberty.

The ideal of the episteme of self-representation, we saw, is full knowledge of the subject in representational activity. This project fails by the continuous escape of the subject from its own representation—always a representation and never the subject itself. The goal of total self-knowledge fails by virtue of the structure of knowledge that produces the goal. This failure, we saw, is informed by a Western preoccupation with completion and unity, a preoccupation that moved the epistemes that prevailed prior to the nineteenth century to an episteme of self-representation. We emphasize now that totalization is one of the continuing values in Western knowledge, whether it take the form of seeing fully into totality or of realizing a completely unified subject.

Self-constitution, as it developed into the Western ethical subject, is as much a part of that ideal as is the episteme of self-representation. Whereas the project of self-representation is full knowledge of the founding subject by the founding subject, such that this knowledge is a complete, founding order for things, the project of self-constitution is self-mastery by means of austere self-transformation. The “technology” that developed to care for the self involved making the self (not the city or the state) an object to itself such that it is the subject of its own mastery. If the self-constitution itself accorded to true principles and rules, it would itself be true. In that sense, although the self might or might not originate its regulations, it founded itself in its self-constituting activity. We see the totalization at work in a concomitant depreciation of proliferation and randomness. Mastery, superiority, domination, and subjectivization form together a major strand of self-constitution as Foucault traces it in volumes II and III of The History of Sexuality.

Liberty means in part the inevitable failure of all projects of mastery. Foucault does not argue that by pursuing mastery individuals deny an aspect of their being which is named liberty. Liberty, as we have seen, names the reversibility, mortality, transitional and mutational aspects, and arbitrariness of orders of knowledge and practice. The gaps among knowledges and practices do not open to an originary, teleological being, but to mere transgression at the limits of given structures, and to nothing other than our relations of power and games of truth. Foucault’s response to liberty, as we have seen, is found in his desire to recognize the danger in all relations of power and forms of knowledge, including his own, and to develop an ethos of genealogy, which we have elaborated in its recoil and self-overcoming movements. The disciplines of genealogical knowledge are not found in an established mastery or in a method of mastery, but in transforming the desires for truth and totalization that move our traditional discourses. The problem that moves Foucault’s work is the clash of totalization and liberty in the ethical subject as it has developed in Western history. That is the “problematization” that arouses his “vigilance.”¹⁶ His genealogy uncovers the strife that defines the limits of ethical subjectivity and that characterizes its dangers: its constitutive denial of the liberty of its lineage by its project of self-constitution in which self-mastery means in practice internalized domination of an individual by given rules and principles that support the interests of specific groups of people. This domination is elaborated socially by relationships of power in which mastery over others and controlled behavior are natural expressions of the ethical subject. Care of self has combined with games of truth and strategies of power to form an ethics that cannot prevent itself from maximizing domination in the name of values. The committed ethical subject is a microcosm of totalization that finds its expression in dominating others under the guise of taking care of them. The steps from ethical subjectivity to oppressive social practices is both small and inevitable.

We have examined the practice of liberty that Foucault values primarily with reference to his genealogy and the knowledge that it produces. In it we find an overcoming of ethical subjectivity, as the authoritative knowledge that is affiliated with it is put in question and as the movement of self-constitution is countermanded and sidestepped. Foucault’s work is characterized by a concern for individuals, for their freedom from domination, for their pleasures, and for their specific thriving and pain. Yet this seemingly ethical concern has led to his appropriating the self-overcoming process that dissolves ethical subjectivity and the knowledge that is affiliated with it. This self-overcoming of the caring subject puts in question all that we can mean by ethics and maximizes the possibilities for reversal of traditional relations of power and knowledge.

The problem of totalization and its multiple forms of domination puts in question the subject that undergoes the problem. The practice of liberty mandates opening the field of social/individual life to self-overcoming without the hallmarks of ethical security, definitive origins and ideal goals. Is it possible that the kind of self-presence that at our best we want to realize and the goals that give us our best meanings arise from a heritage that makes inevitable our worst fears? Is it possible that as ethical subjects we are subject to a destiny of domination that we also want to avoid? That we are divided in our ethical subjectivity by an impossible totalitarian liberty, a conundrum of subjectivity, that makes doubtful the best that we can be and know? Is it possible that the question of ethics holds hope for a life without the ethical subject and without some of the suffering that we ethical subjects bring upon ourselves?